Review: 'Where I Must Go' by Angela Jackson

Chicago poet Angela Jackson has written an atmospheric first novel set amid the turbulent social change of the late 1960s. The novel’s central action takes place at the fictitious Eden University in an unnamed Midwestern city that looks a lot like the real Chicago. As it opens, seventeen-year-old Magdalena (Maggie) Grace is leaving a large and spirited African-American Catholic family to enroll in the prestigious, largely white school. The university is located in the same city, but is a world apart from her home.

Using a first-person voice rich in poetic language, Jackson constructs Maggie’s story, past and present, at Eden University, in the city, and in Mimosa, Mississippi. At times the novel’s present action is overwhelmed by discursive accounts of past events, but those events also contribute to the making of Maggie as a compelling narrator.

From the moment of her arrival on campus, Maggie is singled out as different, set apart. Jackson lingers on Maggie’s movement through the freshman dorm with her family, recording the reactions of the “Whitepeople” who tense on seeing black faces. Maggie feels the chill before she sees a “tall Blackgirl and it’s like summer. The light haunts her, hangs around infatuated and almost splendid. . .My parents relax. Shoulders go up. Unburdened from the solitary confinements of our skin.”

That solitary confinement—the sense of otherness--operates day to day as Maggie lives a life in which hers is often the only dark face in a class, where a charismatic black professor is a “raft in an ocean of white.” Maggie finds her place with two black roommates, Essie Witherspoon and Leona Pryor, and among the other black students on campus, who are strongly characterized. The students come together in a black student union whose official name is Goree, after an African island where slaves were readied for transport. The black students at Eden University call it Blood Island: For Bloods Only. The latter nickname is “a lopsided joke against the country clubs open to the White offspring of Eden and locked to us unless we come as servants or solitary tokens of equality. It’s a joke to us, so it’s a sign written above the doorbell: We admit all. Unwritten is: All of the race that rode a thousand ships, even the lightest trace.”

Jackson has written a persuasive account of black student’s lives in the late 1960s at a time when change was coming, but not yet here. A series of events on campus, escalating to an attack on Maggie’s roommate, Essie, leads to the take-over of the University Finance Building, and a list of demands, by the students of Blood Island. They are still holding the building when, on a tiny black and white TV, they see the first reports of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The aftermath of that event, at the University and back in Maggie’s neighborhood in the city, is some of the best writing in the novel.

Published 40 years after the events it portrays, in an America with an African-American president, "Where I Must Go" is a vivid re-creation of a past that helped create our present.